Chapter II: The Rally of Germany—lessing (2)

Yet this, once more, is but “the other side of a virtue.” The best authorities agree that to Lessing may be assigned absolutely the return to, if not the very initiation of,[65] a direct, scholarly, intelligent, _literary_ study of the ancients themselves. As far as the Greek Theatre itself is concerned, Brumoy had anticipated him: far too little justice has often been done to the work of this modest and solid scholar. But Brumoy’s outlook was wanting in range. Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English,[66] French and German always, Italian, even Spanish[67] to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves—and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was as far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the “modern” advocates in the Quarrel—that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.

[Sidenote: _And especially of Aristotle._]

Perhaps Lessing’s greatest glory is that he has given answer to the despairing question which his master quoted in the Ethics.[68] “If the water chokes, what must one drink on the top of it?” “More and purer water” is that answer, of course: and Lessing scoured the clogged and stagnant channels of Neo-Classicism by recurrence to the original fount. Of course he was not himself absolutely original. He owed something to Heinsius, in that most remarkable tractate to which we did justice in its place, among the more distant moderns, to Dacier, pedant as he is, to Brumoy, to Hurd among the nearer. But more than to any of them he devoted himself to the real text of the _Poetics_, interpreted by a combination of scholarship and mother-wit. To this day he has to be consulted upon the _cruces_ of Fable and Character, of Unity, of knotting and unknotting, of _katharsis_.[69] That he has said no final word on them matters nothing: final words are not to be said on things of opinion and probability

Until God’s great _Venite_ change the song.

But on these and not a few other matters he reorganised the whole method and the whole tenor of the inquiry. And so he not only earns his own place in the story, but half unintentionally establishes, or helps us to establish, the great truth that the whole _is_ a story, a history, a chain of opinion and comment on opinion, now going more, now less, right, but to be kept as a chain.

[Sidenote: _With whom he combines Diderot._]

Nothing can illustrate this better than the fact that Lessing’s second master in criticism is—Diderot! He does not regard that erratic and _cometic_ genius as he regards Aristotle, he does not think the _Bijoux Indiscrets_, and the remarks on the _Fils Naturel_, and the rest, as being “as infallible as the _Elements of Euclid_.”[70] He would have disqualified himself from serious consideration if he had. He dissents from some of Diderot’s opinions; he combats some of his arguments. But he admits, almost in so many words, and in a constant attitude which is more valuable than any verbal admission, that this most irregular, revolutionary, _casual_ of modern thinkers has set him on his own path of independent revaluation of critical principles.

[Sidenote: _His deficiencies in regard to mediæval literature._]

And we find confirmation of this in those of his critical writings which have not yet been mentioned, as well as illustrations of other critical characteristics in him. It is curious that Lessing, so sensitive and receptive to ancient and later modern influences, is almost as proof against mediæval and (in his own language) early modern as Gottsched himself. His low estimate of Lyric seems to come partly from the fact that Aristotle had slighted it, or at least passed it over, partly from the fact that in relation to Germany he is not thinking of her ballads and lays, not even of the extravagances of the seventeenth century, but of the tame Anacreontic of Hagedorn, Gleim, and Company. Even his study of Shakespeare has not set him right in this respect. It is most curious to read his contemporary Hurd, a contemporary for whom Lessing had a just respect, and to remember that Hurd could appreciate not merely both Aristotle and Shakespeare, but both Horace and Spenser. And there are few things which bring out more clearly that immense debt to Shakespeare and Spenser themselves which has been insisted on as due by English criticism. It was too early for Lessing to have gone back to Gottfried and Walther;[71] the German Renaissance had nothing (save the ballads, which he would not have) to offer him.

[Sidenote: _The close of the_ Dramaturgie _and its moral_.]

The greatest places of the _Dramaturgie_ are those at the close of No. 95, and the penultimate passage of all. In the former, after a long discussion of the Aristotelian commentaries of Hurd and Dacier, he refashions his master’s famous dictum in other matter, that “accuracy must not be expected.” He is not, he says, “obliged to solve all the problems he raises.” His thoughts may seem desultory, or even contradictory: but it does not matter if they supply others with the germ of individual thought. He would but scatter “_fermenta cognitionis_.” In the other, he proceeds still farther, though still perhaps without a clear idea how far the path itself will lead. Germans, he says (I shorten somewhat here), had imitated the French because the French were believed to be your only followers of the ancients. Then English plays came in, an entirely different style of drama was revealed, and the Germans concluded that the aim of tragedy could be fulfilled without the French rules—that the rules were wrong. And then they went on to object to rules altogether as mere genius-hampering pedantry. “In short, we had very nearly thrown away in wantonness all past experience, insisting that the poet shall in every instance discover the whole art for himself.” Lessing has endeavoured “to arrest this secondary fermentation,” and that is all.

Invaluable words! and, if somewhat extra-literary,—or, from another point of view, directed to too narrow a part of literature,—yet in their true acceptation governing and guiding the whole method, the entire campaign, of literary criticism. Whether Lessing had taken any suggestion from Batteux,[72] who had written long before him, I do not know: but the different attitude of the French critic and the German is most interesting, and gives the reason why we have treated Batteux in the last volume and are treating Lessing in this. Both writers perceive, each in his own fashion, that every work of genius is, or at any rate contains, a rule. I do not even know that it can be denied that Lessing, almost as much as Batteux, though under happier stars, has an idea of working out one general rule of all the particulars—a process which is but too likely to lead back again into the House of Bondage; but his actual notion takes a far more catholic form, leads far more directly to the way of salvation. You must study each work of genius in order to get its contribution to the Inner Rule, the highest formula. And if you do this all will be well. It is not the Rule—as some falsely hold, and as perhaps some even have falsely thought that the present writer holds— that does the harm, but its exclusive and disfranchising application _a priori_—not even the Kind, but its elevation into a caste, with the correlative institution of pariahdom. And Lessing’s principle of never neglecting study of former experience saves this danger at once.[73]

[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous specimens of his criticism._]

But the twenty volumes of Lessing’s Works, or rather the round dozen, more or less, of them which contain or concern criticism, are not to be passed over without some more detailed mention. The first contains (besides the early and not uninteresting Preface to his collected _Poems_ in 1753) the famous Dissertations on the Fable, which, whether one agrees or not with them, give an admirable example of the thoroughness, the sense, and the scholarship of Lessing’s critical method. He lays out the history of opinion on his subject from Aristotle and Aphthonius to Breitinger and Batteux; he combats, not long-windedly but scientifically, those opinions with which he disagrees; he sets forth his own with such further disposition of the subject as he thinks proper. And in sixty pages he has given as masterly an example of “criticism on a _kind_,” of general criticism (for we must maintain the reservations above outlined), as need be desired—an example uniting antique clearness and proportion, scholastic method, and modern vivacity and illustrative variety. A somewhat different kind of document, but the kind which we have so often looked for in vain hitherto, is given by the great mass of reviews, literary letters, the rhetorical discussions of various kinds, and the like, which fill four successive volumes.[74] From the very first, written when Lessing was but two-and-twenty, his scholarship, his reading, and his formidable and rather aggressive intellectual ability, appear unmistakably. Much is mere abstract, but more independent work appears from the long and early criticism of the _Captivi_[75] to the review of Meinhardt’s _Italian Poets_, which came just before the _Laocoön_.

Here may be found all manner of dealings with interesting and heterogeneous subjects and persons, from Rousseau’s Dijon Discourse through Klopstock and Piron, Bodmer’s sacred epics (“Three Epic Poets in Germany at once!” says Lessing, setting the tone of mischievous reviewing early; “too much! too much of a good thing!”), and “Gentil” Bernard on the Art of Love, to elaborate dissertations on Simon Lemnius, the author of that edifying work the _Monachopornomachia_.[76] And later,[77] in more extensive reference to German Literature, much about the early work of Klopstock and Wieland, a sustained polemic against Gottsched, ranging from serious attacks on his authority as a literary historian and critic to “skits” tending to prove that he was the author of _Candide_,[78] not unaccompanied by businesslike abstracts of the critic’s own work to adjust the same to more general acceptance.[79]

Of the _Kleinere Philologische Abhandlungen_, which fill the 15th volume, the curious “Rettungen des Horaz” have been glanced at above. The opening “Vademecum für Lange,” a vitriolic and practically destructive retort on that blundering translator of Horace himself, who had not had the sense to sit down quietly under a severe but not offensive review of Lessing’s, is one of the capital examples of its kind—a kind questionable but sometimes to be allowed. The “Anmerkungen über das Epigramm,” the principal single constituent of the volume,[80] are very noteworthy. The rest consist mainly of textual and other animadversions of the kind which we reluctantly leave out here from the Renaissance downward. The chief are on Paulus Silentiarius, and on that interesting book the fables of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.

He returns to this in one[81] of the numerous papers of vol. xvi., another collection of notes, notices (some of Old German Literature), and reviews, the last mostly very short and sometimes a little perfunctory. What might have been the most, and is not the least, interesting of these,[82] has for subject a German translation of the first two volumes of _The Rambler_ in 1754. Lessing does not name Johnson, nor does he seem to know anything about him; but he praises the Essays highly. Now, if you could have combined the good points of these two, and “sprinkled in,” as Mambrun might say,[83] a little _furor romanticus_, it would have been difficult to get a better critical mixture than the result.

The still further collection of critical miscellanea in vol. xix. is mostly philosophical or, according to Lessing’s unfortunate later habit, theological in character,[84] but the long “Pope als Metaphysiker” deserves mention as at least partially literary and as more than partially good. Finally, the numerous and not seldom interesting notes or motes of the _Kollectaneen_ or Commonplace Book published after Lessing’s death, though they frequently approach or flit round strictly literary criticism, never, I think, actually constitute it.[85]

[Sidenote: _His attitude to Æschylus and Aristophanes._]

In the case of so great a name occupying the most prominent position at the last turning-point of the recorded critical course, it is necessary to insist on those reserves which have been made already. Everybody who has read Lessing carefully must have noticed, whether with immediate understanding of the reason or not, the very small attention which he pays to two writers in his own favourite department, whom some would call the very greatest in it, as far as Greece is concerned, and to whom hardly any nowadays would deny a place among the greatest of Greece or of the world—that is to say, Æschylus and Aristophanes. His defenders are prompt with an excuse at least as damaging as most excuses. People did not, says Lessing’s very able and very erudite commentator, M. Kont, fully understand in those days the importance of Æschylus in connection with Greek myths: and the forms of drama which he, and still more Aristophanes, adopted were unsuitable to that modern use and application which Lessing always had at heart. Alas! the value of an author in connection with Greek myths is so exceedingly indifferent to literature! and his value as helping to fill a stage at the present day is also of so very little importance! If ignorance of one of these things and consciousness of the absence of the other determined Lessing’s neglect of the greatest tragic poet of Greece,—of the greatest comic poet, except Shakespeare, of the world,—then it will be but too clear that whatever Lessing cared most for, it was not poetry,—that his care for poetry as such—nay, for literature as such—was even rather small. To call him a “king of criticism” is foolish, because that is just what he is not. He is grand-duke of not a few critical provinces which, somehow or other, he never can consolidate into a universal monarchy of critical wit.

Let me, however, assure any of my readers who are apt to regard as “unfriendly” or “unsympathetic” criticism which is not eulogy thick and slab, neat and unmixed, that there is no intention here of belittling Lessing’s critical qualities,[86] only one of indicating critically what they were and what they were not. The gift of critical expression he most certainly had in a very high degree. His exposition is masterly: though he is constantly, as has been said, leading the discussion aside from concrete to abstract, and from particular to general points, he is scarcely ever obscure, confused, or vague. His language is precise, without being technical or jargonish. He has something of the German lack of urbanity, but he often has a felicity of expression that is French rather than German, with depth and humour which are far more German than French. Never has one of the tricks of the critical pedant— common to the kind in our day as in his—been so happily described as in the opening of _Wie die Alten den Tod gebildeten_: “Herr Klotz always thinks he is at my heels. But when I look back at his yelp, I see him lost in a cloud of dust quite astray from the road I have trodden.”[87] The unlucky distraction of his later years, to theological or anti-theological squabbling may—nay, must—have lost us much. But as it is, he never fails for long together to give those _fermenta cognitionis_ of which he speaks. He is always “for thoughts”: that fecundity, as a result of the critical congress, which we shall remark in his part-master Diderot, is everywhere present in him.

[Sidenote: _Frederic the Great._]

Lessing, whom the king neglected, may suggest Frederic the Great, whose _De la Littérature Allemande_ (1780) the Germans have most forgivingly translated into the language despised by the writer, and adopted as a “monument” of its literature.[88] It is certainly a monument of a kind, and the most striking contrast possible to Lessing’s work. I shall not say that it shows, as a Carlylian not less fervent than myself[89] has admitted of Frederic’s historian on Marryat, that Frederic “was stupid for once in his life.” But it certainly shows that he could be absurdly narrow and perverse, and could push the confidence of ignorance to a wonderful length. That Frederic _was_ very ignorant of literature there is no doubt. It is known that he “had small Latin[90] and _no_ Greek”; his expressions about English, the language and the literature, in this very tractatule, are, if possible, more impudently ignorant than those about German: he does not, I think, so much as name a Spanish author; and his references to Italian might have been, and probably were, derived from mere hearsay.

All this was a good preparation for judging a literature in the very peculiar state of German in 1780, when, to do it justice, a man should have had the knowledge, then almost impossible, of the various periods from “Middle High” onwards, the power to appreciate its very different phases, which few had, and the power, which hardly anybody ever has, of appreciating the literary present, and even future. But Frederic need not have made so near an approach to stupidity as he makes here.[91]

[Sidenote: De la Littérature Allemande.]

That there is considerable truth and shrewdness in the king’s censure of his subjects’ pedantry and want of taste is quite certain; that the German language was in a less favourable condition for literature than any other of the great European languages is certain also. Many of his practical precepts are as sensible as we should expect from a man so great in affairs. But his literary criticism is rather worse than we should expect even from a disciple of Voltaire, whose pet prejudices they not merely reflect but exaggerate. Of all the “answers” (a most interesting list of which, with account of them where possible, from that one of Goethe’s, which has the here most deplorable “defect of being lost,” downwards, will be found in Herr Geiger’s Introduction) the happiest is in three words of Herder’s, which describe the treatise as “_ein comisches Meisterstück_.”[92] Frederic attributes to Horace, and in the _Ars Poetica_ too, four words[93] which do not occur there, which would not be very easy to get into the metre without destroying their juxtaposition, and which it would be not much easier to adjust to any context of the actual piece. He attributes to Aristotle not merely the Three Unities, but instead of the “Unity of _Action_” the “Unity of _Interest_,” thus handing over

the whole position to the anti-Aristotelians after a fashion which, if one of the king’s own generals had imitated it in actual war, would have “broken” him for life, if it had not put him against a wall, and opposite to a file of grenadiers. He thinks that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote in Latin; that Toland wrote the _Leviathan_; that Marot, Rabelais, and Montaigne wrote a jargon at least as bad as any German— “gross and destitute of grace.” In the most celebrated passage[94]— perhaps the only one generally known—he not only out-Voltaires Voltaire by speaking of the “abominable pieces of Shakespeare,” those absurd “farces worthy of Canadian savages,” but stigmatises _Goetz von Berlichingen_ as a “detestable imitation” of them. He hardly knows of any other German writers, and of those whom he praises Gellert and Gessner are the only ones who have retained the least reputation. If for one thing that he did—the injunction to write in German and not take refuge in other languages—one is tempted to spare him, the merit almost disappears when one remembers that he meant the German to be written in the teeth of the natural bent of the language. The bulk of his positive directions has nothing to do with literature whatsoever, but with the teaching of physical science, of law, &c. And the real apex of the _comisches Meisterstück_ (for Herder’s words are too good not to be repeated) is to be found at the end. He prophesies, and (such is the unending and unfathomable irony of Fate!) he prophesies quite truly, that “the palmy days of our Literature have not come, but they are approaching,” that he is their harbinger, that they are just about to appear, “that though he shall not see them, his age making it hopeless, he, like Moses, sees the Promised Land, but must not enter it.” The inevitable jests at Moses himself, and the bare “rocks of sterile Idumea,” follow. But it was Moses who laughed last. Every word of Frederic’s prophecy came true; but it was because Germany neglected every item of Frederic’s prescription. The palmy days did come: they lasted for fifty glorious years and (with Heine) longer. But their light was the light borrowed from the abominable Shakespeare, and their leader was the author of _Goetz von Berlichingen_.[95]